In recent years, electrophotographic copiers and printers come to be more often utilized in printing and color printing applications. In said printing and color printing applications, digital black and white images or color images having high image quality are strongly required. For this demand, it is proposed to form a high precision digital image by use of laser light having a short wavelength as an exposure light source (Patent Document 1). However, it is in a present situation that the resulting electrophotographic image has not achieved a sufficiently high quality image even though a dot latent image is formed on the organic photoreceptor via precise dot exposure.
One of the reasons lies in that even though a precise dot latent image is formed on an organic photoreceptor employing a semiconductor laser, the dot latent image can not be precisely reproduced as a toner image. In particular, the dot latent image formed by a semiconductor laser or others is reproduced as a toner image smaller or larger than a latent image in size, since a uniform surface property of the organic photoreceptor in the order of a micron dimension can not be obtained, resulting in no formation of a microscopically uniform toner image, and problems are easily produced such that transfer hollow defects (hereinafter, referred simply to as hollow defects) are generated, resulting in lowered image density, since the toner image formed on the photoreceptor is not sufficiently transferred into a transfer medium (being a transfer material or an intermediate image transfer body such as paper sheets and so forth).
Proposed as a method to improve the surface property of the organic photoreceptor is an organic photoreceptor containing fluorine-containing resin particles on the photoreceptor surface (Patent Document 2). The organic photoreceptor containing these fluorine-containing resin particles exhibits an anti-toner filming property as well as a surface anti-stain property, but fluorine-containing resin particles are difficult to be dispersed in the order of a micron dimension in a binder resin, and the fluorine-containing resin particles and the binder resin are separated at the micron size level, whereby blurred images are easily generated. Another problem is also produced such that scratches are easily generated on the surface layers of fluorine-containing resin particles because of an insufficient wear resistance property of the surface layer, whereby scratches are easily generated in halftone images.    (Patent Document 1) Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication No. 2001-255685    (Patent Document 2) Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication No. 8-328287
The present invention was conducted to solve the foregoing problems. It is an object of the present invention to provide an organic photoreceptor in which a dot latent image formed on an organic photoreceptor employing an imagewise exposure light source of a semiconductor laser can be precisely reproduced onto the organic photoreceptor as a toner image, and the reproduced toner image is assuredly transferred into a transfer medium, and also to provide the organic photoreceptor accompanied with a process cartridge, an image forming method and an image forming apparatus employing the organic photoreceptor, in which an improved cleaning ability is obtained, transferability of a toner image on the organic photoreceptor into a transfer medium is also improved, generation of hollow defects as well as degraded dot images can be inhibited, and the surface layer exhibiting an improved cleaning ability can also be obtained.